Booking and details
Dates Fri, Feb 21 – Sun, Aug 10, 2025
Venue Stuart and Mimi Rose Rare Book and Manuscript Exhibition Hall
Tickets Free; timed-entry pass recommended
Social climbing was a competitive sport in Tudor England, requiring a complex range of skills, strategies, and techniques. How to Be a Power Player: Tudor Edition invites you into a world of lace ruffs, jousting, hawks, bad handwriting, scandal, and political factions. Experience the playbooks, the people, and the spectacular fails, as courtiers tried to navigate the minefield of working for a boss who could shower you with riches or chop off your head.
The exhibition features more than 60 objects from the Folger’s collection to demonstrate the “rules” for how to be a successful courtier. They show how historical and literary figures ranging from royal advisors to household staff used cunning, cutthroat, and creative means to acquire power and curry favor with the Tudor monarchs.
Take the Tudor playbook and give it a 21st-century spin! Visit the Engagement Table in the exhibition gallery to create a playbook that highlights the risks you might take to become a power player. Draw your portrait, design a dinner menu, and come up with your own rule.
On view
See selected highlights below.
Rule #1: Study the playbooks
To be a power player in Tudor England, you needed to study the playbooks. Potential senior advisors to the queen studied “courtesy books” and “mirrors for princes”, which described the qualities, skills, and behaviors necessary to succeed at court.
Famous playbooks
Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince: A political treatise that tells leaders how to gain and retain power
Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier: The definitive 16th-century book of manners, advising society’s elite how to dress, behave, and even dance
Strategic gifting
Queen Elizabeth I received gifts from and gave them to her inner circle of high-ranking men and women, advisors, and personal servants in an elaborate invitation-only New Year’s Day ceremony. To be a power player, you needed to get on the gift list (Rule #7).
Portrait miniatures
As tokens of loyalty and affection, portrait miniatures created intimacy (Rule #4) as a way of furthering one’s agenda. Power players commissioned the most talented and sought-after miniaturists in England to paint these exquisitely detailed portraits, often set in locket-like gold frames. They were to be viewed privately, rather than hung on a wall for all to see.
Who’s who
Expand the gallery to learn more about the people pictured.
Global power players
The Tudor court was like a consulate, frequented by merchants, ambassadors, and diplomats from around the world. It was also like a newsroom, with flurries of international letters, gifts, and dispatches sent and received. These connections were key to the crown’s ability to stay relevant, manage reputations, and expand English influence—as well as English pocketbooks—on a global scale.
The exhibition profiles six of these global power players, including the Powhatan representative Matoaka, also known as Pocahontas.
Curator
Heather Wolfe is Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is currently writing a book on early modern stationery in England. She has published widely on topics such as early modern women’s manuscripts, writing tables, filing holes, letterwriting practices, Shakespeare’s coat of arms, rag collectors, and hybrid books. She teaches paleography (how to read old handwriting) for the Folger Institute and is leading an ongoing project to transcribe all of the Folger’s manuscripts. She curated the online resources Shakespeare Documented and Early Modern Manuscripts Online and was co-director of the Mellon-funded project Before Farm to Table. With Julie Fisher and Sara Powell, she created the virtual paleographical escape room, The Ghost of Blithfield Hall, which has been played by hundreds of budding paleographers.
I hope visitors see the parallels between Tudor England and today. Cancel culture, brand management, nepotism, power dressing, and the idea of “fake it ’til you make it” were all a part of life for people seeking a position in the queen’s inner circle.
Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts
Related programs
DIY at the Folger: The Tudor Ruff
Family Workshop: A Power Player Spectacle
Family Workshop: The Art of the Shakespearean Power Player
Related blog posts
7 habits of highly effective social climbers
Imagine you want to become a power player in the rather authoritarian court of Queen Elizabeth. You want her to notice you in a favorable way, so you need to dress, act, and speak just right. Here are a few pointers.
Fashion in the Tudor court
Learn the power of style in Tudor England and how the right ruff could help ambitious courtiers distinguish themselves in a competitive court.
Bess of Hardwick, Elizabethan power player
Bess of Hardwick was the other famous Bess in Elizabethan England, after “Good Queen Bess,” aka Queen Elizabeth. Fabulously wealthy and savvy, she outlived four husbands, rising in status with each one. Trace her evolving power in letters from her last three husbands.
A letter from the Queen's lifelong favorite
A letter to Elizabeth I from the earl of Leicester, who was organizing the defense of Britain against the Spanish Armada at the time, shows their playful relationship.
Folger Finds: New Year's Gift Rolls of Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
In early modern England, New Year’s Day was celebrated with a long-standing custom of giving gifts to the monarch. Each gift was carefully recorded on “gift rolls.” What were the top gifts in 1539 and 1585?
Curator interview
This interview with exhibition curator Heather Wolfe spotlights How to Be a Power Player: Tudor Edition and the PBS Masterpiece series Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. Visit the website of the “Historical Drama with the Boston Sisters” podcast to download the episode.
Additional exhibition credits
Amanda Herbert, Associate Professor (Early Modern Americas) in the Department of History, University of Durham
Co-curator of “Into the Vault” section
David McKenzie, Head of Exhibitions
Kristen Sieck, Exhibitions Coordinator
Renate Mesmer, J. Franklin Mowery Head of Conservation and Preservation
Rachel Bissonnette, Book and Paper Conservator
Kathryn Kenney, Book and Paper Conservator
Charlotte Starnes, Conservation Intern
Rebecca Niles, Digital Developer
Jessica Frazier, Editorial Consultant
Design: Topos Graphics
Fabrication: Capitol Museum Services
Printing: EPI Colorspace